This invention relates generally to an electronic typewriter and, more particularly, to an electronic typewriter for printing documents having fixed formats.
Various business documents, such as, but not limited to, business and legal forms have fixed formats. When such documents are prepared using a conventional typewriter they often need to be typed with reference had to a preprinted similarly formatted document. Unfortunately, an entire new document must be prepared even though there may be only a few differences between the preprinted document and the document to be prepared. In the event that the document to be typed is several pages or more in length, the chances of the typist committing a typographical error or of straying from the fixed format increases, resulting in an unacceptable document which may need to be retyped several times before eliminating all typographical errors and conforming to the fixed format.
Preprinted fill-in-forms which include blank areas to be filled in (e.g. name of an individual, corporation, address etc.) require the typist to move the carriage of the typewriter to the location of each blank area, making it difficult to easily edit such documents. These blank areas also can be too large or too small for the information to be typed therein resulting in a document which may be difficult and/or confusing to read.
Documents having fixed formats also can be printed by a word processing system. Word processing systems which include editing functions for fixed format type documents, however, complicate the word processing system and can be difficult to operate. For documents having fixed formats with few areas to be filled in, such word processors are needlessly burdensome to operate.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an electronic typewriter which allows a typist to prepare a document having a fixed format more easily. The typewriter should not require that a typist determine and move the carriage to the exact position in the document for each blank area to be filled in or involve a system which is otherwise difficult to operate.